bell hooks: I'll meet you at the crossroads

Humble gift though it is, today I'd like to give my appreciation and draw hopefully simultaneously draw more attention to the scholarly work of one of the authors of the twentieth and twenty-first century who has been successful at making the conversation around feminism and patriarchy bigger.  Today we discuss bell hooks.

Standing at the center of the oppressive panopticon

For those of you who may be less conversant in feminist literature, bell hooks is a scholar that's been writing important texts since the seventies.  Before she was an academic, however, she was one daughter of a working class family in Kentucky that lived through the insult of segregated education and the trauma of integration.  Indeed, the confluence of multiple oppressive systems in her life primed hooks to significantly broaden the feminist conversation - bell understands intuitively the way that capitalism, racism and patriarchy function in a mutually supportive way to preserve the fundamental distribution of power in the status quo.  She made an argument for intersectionality - an understanding of identity that expands beyond the singular explanation to consider the dynamics interactions that shape people and movements.  

As a black feminist, bell experienced (perhaps still experiences) marginalization; she identified the toxic way that many conversations about gender equality entrench other forms of oppression, either by devaluing voices that come from outside of the center of the movement or deprioritizing issues that particularly affect members of the movement who have other overlapping identities.  For instance, one might argue that when Chris Rock attacked Jennifer Lawrence by comparing her struggle to the arguably more significant struggle of black female actors, he was raising an issue of intersectional feminism, challenging the idea that there is a singular collection of "women's issues" that impact all women equally (I critiqued the tenor of Rock's response as divisive to broader movements against oppression, but that doesn't mean it isn't a conversation worth having).  A strong alternative to oppressive power structures should be radically open to all voices.

Many people on the left aren't crazy about scholars like hooks that critique the state of activist movements; they perceive such scholarship as nitpicking or inflexible idealism that sacrifices the good in the name of the perfect.  I would argue that such attitudes are a replication of the same oppressive structures that movements try to combat.  I've criticized patriarchal institutions and world views for privileging certain forms of knowledge or certain modes of thoughts, and movements that don't value a diversity of voices and experiences are a micro-political reproduction of exactly the same thing.  bell hooks and her ideological successors are the post-modern vanguard intent on guaranteeing that as movements gradually collapse the old power structures, the new world that emerges will actually be better than the one it replaces.

To put it another way, a feminism that seeks only to make women equal in standing to men will inevitably fail, because not all men are equal to each other.  Racism and capitalism elevate the rights and protections that some men receive, and a meaningful challenge to that inequality cannot neglect other systemic oppressions to focus only on one.  It's a failing strategy and it fractures the coalition of humanity whose common interest is positive global transformation.